“They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest"

Experiments in self-rule right here within our borders. The OWS kitchen staff are "angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for 'professional homeless' people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters."

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.

A security volunteer added that the cooks felt “overworked and underappreciated.”

. . . They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.

. . . Many of those being fed “are professional homeless people. They know what they’re doing,” said the guard at the food-storage area.

On top of that, there's a new percussion tax. "The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips."

Megan McArdle has an interesting take on anarchy and its discontents here:

But as many of us discovered back in college, ultimately, you cannot run any sustained movements along the lines of perfectly inclusive democracy. It's not just that the people who won't cooperate tend to ruin everything for everyone else, though this is a huge problem -- if you make it a policy not to exclude or punish anyone for any reason, you're going to attract a small-but-catastrophic number of sociopaths who are immune to your only tool of social control, which is shaming.

But there's another problem, one that anecdotally seems to be growing at Occupy Wall Street: without authority, you spend virtually all your waking hours negotiating trivia.

As I saw on another blog, if the OWS folks think that people who have been feeding themselves by dumpster diving for garbage are going to be discouraged by reducing their hot freshly-cooked meal to brown rice and other "spartan fare", they're really not in touch with reality.

The whole thing is giving me the giggles now. Between the homeless taking advantage of the free food in NYC, to the weed smokers and non weedsmokers splitting the LA group, to the Oakland group getting itself beat by the cops, to the Portland group apparently being ripped off by one of their own to the tune of $20k, this whole thing cannot have been a better demonstration of why these clowns deserve to be ignored. (and deserve what they get).